βBackground
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Social Native connects brands with creators to produce authentic social content, helping them build communities of ambassadors and influencers. Branded Content is their startup venture: a marketplace platform making discovery, communication, and transactions between buyers and creators faster and more frictionless. We partnered with them to build a custom web application on a MACH approach, microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless.
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Objectives
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- Design the solution: Propose and design a technical approach to build an online marketplace in 3β4 months where creators and brands can advertise, communicate, and transact.
- Build the frontend: A fast custom frontend on Nuxt 3, able to handle high-volume traffic and transactions.
- Build the backend: A custom backend on commercetools to reduce time-to-market and cost.
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Challenges
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A marketplace brings challenges beyond typical eCommerce: payment integrations, collecting social-media follower data, and an integrated chat system for buyers and creators. We had to leverage and configure the commercetools API and platform for Social Native's specific needs, while orchestrating dynamic, fast-changing startup requirements, collaborating with an overseas client design team and maintaining an Agile workflow across a large in-house dev team.
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Profile & offer creation
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The platform streamlines collaborations for influencers and ambassadors: they can create profiles, manage collabs, and define packages with clear offer details, minimizing confusion for buyers. A creator dashboard keeps all relevant information in one place for easy management of their work.
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A comprehensive buyer experience
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Buyers can search and browse by creator or by content type, channel, or industry, making it easy for brands of any size to find creators that match their budget and expectations. The platform combines marketplace, communication, transactions, and content review in one place, simplifying influencer management for brand PR teams.
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Communication at the heart
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Chat is central to a high-performing marketplace. We used TalkJS for a smooth, seamless chat experience that keeps brands and influencers engaged and informed, and layered in email notifications via SendGrid at key stages, so everyone stays up to date on agreements, feedback, and approvals.
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The MACH approach
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We built a custom frontend on Vue.js and Nuxt integrated with commercetools, an API-first, cloud-based, headless SaaS. The priorities were fast loading and the ability to scale to millions of creators, with a smooth collaboration and payment flow (PayPal). On the backend, commercetools' flexibility gave us many integration points; we built an API Gateway with FrameworkX (on reactPHP) to simplify communication between frontend and commercetools, plus several microservices for customization. FrameworkX brought asynchronicity and higher performance to PHP, cutting time-to-market and cost.
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